Thursday, April 22, 2010

Day 25, April 22, 2010

Today's writing involved doing something I've never done before while writing a novel: including another art form within the body of the narrative. One of the things the story's antagonists do is to mock one of the principal characters by lampooning her in a comic strip that is distributed over the Internet by a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed. In order to make clear how ridicule takes place, I have to describe in a panel-by-panel sequence what happens in the comic strip. Using only words to recreate a principally visual means of telling a funny story was a bit of a challenge. But I think I pulled it off. I made myself laugh anyway.

In any case, I kept the story moving forward. I foreshadowed the emotional jeopardy the protagonist will face. I introduced a new potential villain—or maybe a red herring—in one of the storylines. And as mentioned above I showed that the antagonists are highly creative, which makes them all the more dangerous.